Choosing a role

I’ve been focusing on my second gamedev.tv course, this time it’s How To Get A Job In The Video Game Industry. The first major task set in this course is figuring out the areas I’m most interested in working. Frankly, everything that goes into making a game is fascinating, but there’s two areas I immediately connect with.

Gameplay designer/level designer

This is the first one I instantly felt connected with and had loads of ideas. Well designed game mechanics are essential to a game that plays well and is fun, they’re the meaningful interactions a player has with the game. The cause and effect that makes a game interactive. From something as simple as the player hitting the ball back in pong to choosing to cast a spell in an RPG, it’s where the player’s control takes place inside the game.

Tightly linked to these ideas is level design. Rather than being controlled by the player a level is controlling the player in some way, be it making them taking one route or forcing them to choose a route. It’s also the environment that gives mechanics context. How high the player can jump only matters when there’s a level with defined objects to jump on or over.

The interplay of choices that gameplay mechanics and level design create together fascinates me. For example players may have choices how they navigate the game world, but some things are either unchangeable, or can only be changed by paying some price. For example you can blow up sections of walls – but only have so many explosives available – so which walls do you choose? Prompting choices is always engaging because it makes players think and deal with ideas about benefits and downsides.

A game I spent a lot of time playing when it came out is Phantom Doctrine – it has some awesome levels and mechanics, and they’re the biggest reasons I kept playing it for so long. Turn based games remind me of chess because the characters are like pieces on a board with certain movement abilities, and at the end of each series of moves the opponent gets their turn. The basic premise of Phantom Doctrine that it’s a game about espionage and has infiltration levels where you move a team of characters around to achieve various objectives. The combination of mechanics different characters can enact at any moment – and the level design are constantly making the player analyse and think twice about each move. Broadly the levels play in two modes, combat and stealth. All missions start as stealth, but they can become combat by choice or by making a mistake and accidentally raising the alarm. But even within these two modes the player has to evaluate the level of risk they’re willing to take at each moment and how to progress through the level.

That’s what fascinates me about level design and gameplay design, together they create the game world’s freedoms and constraints, effectively the upper and lower limits you can play within.

Gameplay programmer/AI programmer

These roles also fascinate me. Gameplay programming ties in well with aspects of level design. Rather than being about where things go it’s about how those things behave. Of course, how they behave affects where they should go! It’s all linked up and that’s interesting.

AI programming is fascinating. Most games have NPCs who do all kinds of thing, and how they behave has such a big influence on the game atmosphere and challenges. Maybe it’s creating a ghost you need to avoid, or a robot that you need to catch, there’s a lot of room to add character through behaviour. How do they move, slow, fast? How do they interact with the level and objects inside it? Even seemingly simple games have surprises inside them, for example learning that each of the four ghosts in PAC MAN have different algorithms got me thinking about how NPCs shouldn’t always be just clones of each other. Pinky, the pink ghost is the only one who constantly focuses on chasing pac man. He must be important to keep the game moving and the player having to move through the maze, which is an important part of the game’s pace. It’s supposed to keep you engaged and focused. He’s also the only ghost that can speed up at times. The other ghosts either target areas near, but not actually pac man’s location, or switch in and out of pursuing. I expect these behaviours are needed to avoid a situation where the ghosts all simply end up in a row following pac man through the maze. That outcome would be boring. The game needs to keep up the pace and keep the ghosts roaming around, but still keeping pressure on the player. The constant movement of NPCs in Phantom Doctrine also keeps up pressure on the player to keep moving, and creates surprises that need to be dealt with as the level progresses. This is the kind of balancing that I find fascinating.

On a bigger scale, an AI might be controlling far more than one character. An AI could have a whole army to direct, and that raises so many interesting questions about that AI’s personality and the choices it might make, and how they would affect gameplay and challenges. Each unit might have its own granular AI like the ones in pac man that come in as needed, but above that is being directed by an AI with a wider goal involving many units.

Other possibilities

I’ve also been working a lot in blender and krita recently to make 3D game assets. I didn’t identify this initially as an area I expected to work, but I’m enjoying it a lot and have been steadily developing my abilities. I’m not sure where this will go long term, but I know it will help me make my first portfolio project computer games, and I know the general knowledge about how these assets are created will be useful longer term when working as part of a team.

Next step

I’m going to continue with the courses about creating example games and attempt to go beyond the tutorials and expand these games in the areas I’m most interested in. And when I create my own games independently I’ll be focusing my efforts on gameplay/level design, and gameplay/AI programming. Rather than guessing I want to find out first hand how much I enjoy working with these areas of creating games. Also, it’s good for filling my portfolio with relevant experience.